Extraordinary triumph over adversity characterised the life of the journalist Paul Spiegel, who has died aged 68. The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany from 2000, he had been forced to flee the Nazis as a child, and returned in 1945 to a homeland almost bereft of Jews, who had once numbered 650,000.

At first sceptics thought Spiegel would make a humdrum leader. He seemed more reticent than his larger-than-life presidential predecessor, Ignatz Bubis, who died in 1999. Yet unlike Bubis, Spiegel proved a canny team player. He soon stamped his imprimatur on the office.

Often, that meant speaking bluntly. He reprimanded lawyers who demanded vast fees to represent the reparations petitions of former slave labourers. By questioning the Jewish authenticity of some immigrants, he offended followers of more liberal Jewish trends. He queried American Jewish groups' presumption to intervene in German affairs. And in 2005, he suggested that Berlin's long-delayed Holocaust memorial still failed to explain "why a civilised people in the heart of Europe [was] capable of carrying out mass murder".

Even as heart disease and leukaemia sapped his strength, he confronted Iranian President Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denials and threats against Israel, calling them "the worst comments ever heard from a statesman since Adolf Hitler".

It was in 1993 that he was elected deputy head of the central council, and seven years later came the presidency. By then Germany was host to the fastest - indeed, the only - growing Jewish community in Europe. This renaissance followed Germany's reunification and improved post-1989 immigration rights for Soviet Jews. From some 28,000 Jews registered in Germany in 1983, the number boomed to an estimated 60,000 by 1995, and up to 110,000 today.

Spiegel relished the paradox of Jews thriving on land that Hitler pledged to make for ever empty of them. At the same time Spiegel faced tensions within his community, between traditionalists and reformers, and between a dwindling generation of German-speakers and eastern bloc newcomers who now greatly outnumber the indigenes.

More worrying still was the resurgence of anti-semitism, which Spiegel tirelessly condemned. Once-hidden outrages by rightwing extremists "now happen in open daylight, publicly, shamelessly and provocatively". Complacent about hard-won democratic rights, and resentful of apologising for another generation's crimes, too many Germans, he argued, ignored anti-Jewish slurs - including those couched in leftist antipathy to America and Israel.

He equally powerfully lambasted xenophobia against Turks and Africans, and prejudiced treatment of gay and homeless people. In November 2000 Spiegel attacked a Christian Democrat leader, Friedrich Merz, for demanding that immigrants adhere to a German leitkultur (defining culture). Leitkultur might dress itself up as affirmation of inclusive liberal values, contended Spiegel, but it was, in truth, shorthand for old-fashioned völkisch ethnic nationalism.

Certainly, anti-foreign animus has not abated. Racially motivated violence leapt by 23% in 2005. "For the sake of German society's dignity," proclaimed Spiegel in 2003, "it cannot allow this kind of inhumanity to grow." All concerned individuals, he insisted, should berate politicians to prevent a situation "where people in our country must once again be afraid".

Spiegel often appeared on public platforms with Nadeem Elyas, the Saudi-born head of the Muslim Zentralrat in Germany, which speaks for some 3 million co-religionists. After Spiegel died, the Muslim council affectionately recalled his discussions with them, and praised his unequivocal opposition to Islamophobia.

Spiegel favoured reconciliation - even painfully frank dialogue - to hostility grounded on a supposed "clash of civilisations". He called for religious sensitivity on the Danish cartoons crisis rather than "lectures delivered in the style of a schoolmaster on western principles of freedom of speech".

In 2005 Spiegel welcomed the visit of the newly appointed German-born Pope Benedict XVI to a Cologne synagogue - even though he had earlier chided the then Cardinal Ratzinger for advocating the beatification of the allegedly anti-semitic Pope Pius IX.

Spiegel's lasting achievement came in 2003, when he persuaded Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to place the Jewish community on an equal legal footing with Germany's main churches. Their accord was signed, auspiciously, on the 58th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Such honours must have seemed unimaginable to the child born on the last day of 1937 in Warendorf, Westphalia. Sensing impending genocide, his cattle-dealer father fled with Paul, his mother and sister Rosa to the apparent safety of Brussels in 1939. But the Nazis soon overran Belgium, Rosa was grabbed by the Gestapo and probably died in Bergen-Belsen. His father languished in three camps and Paul spent the war hiding with Catholic farmers in Flanders.

Somehow he reunited with his parents in Warendorf, as described in his book Wieder zu Hause? (At Home Again? 2003). The family began life anew in Germany - a choice few survivors took, believing that German soil was for ever tainted by Nazi crimes.

Blessed with a flair for words, Spiegel trained as a journalist with a newly founded Jewish newspaper now known as the Jüdische Allgemeine, in Düsseldorf. He became its editor in 1958, married Gisèle Spatz in 1964, and in 1965 left the paper to take up an administrative post on the central council.

After a brief stint editing a fashion magazine, he worked for the Rhineland Savings Bank's public relations department (1974-86). He then founded an agency for writers, artists and public speakers which remained his "day job" even after he became council deputy-president and later president.

Spiegel received many awards, including an honorary doctorate and the 2001 Heinrich-Albertz peace prize. He became a familiar fixture of public life and President Horst Koehler dubbed him a "great German patriot". He was cultivated though never intellectually aloof, a straight talker who learnt the value of diplomacy, a charmer and wit who refused to stint on matters of principle.

Lauding his "engagement with civil courage, tolerance and mutual respect", German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated what could be his epitaph: "He warned, where others remained silent."

He is survived by his wife and their two daughters.

· Paul Spiegel, community leader and journalist, born December 31 1937; died April 30 2006